Monday 14 April 2008 02.11 EDT
First published on Monday 14 April 2008 02.11 EDT

A few months ago, Roger Alton turned 60, an age when most former editors feel like putting their feet up, or at least confining themselves to a couple of columns and a visiting professorship. Moreover, Alton spent 34 years, almost his entire working life, with a single newspaper group, working first for the Guardian and then in 1998 moving to edit the Observer. Despite the internal tensions that contributed to his departure last year, his period in the chair was widely acclaimed. The Observer, in such decline when he took over that it had seen off four editors in five years, was bucking the market trend by the end of the Alton era, gaining circulation while nearly all others were losing.

Yet, as announced last week, he is taking on the editorship of the Independent. Why do that at the end of a glorious career? The paper looks even more of a hopeless case than the Observer did 10 years ago. Though the headline circulation is 246,000, its full-rate UK circulation is a mere 144,862, roughly half that of the Guardian and nearly 300,000 behind the Times - which it once briefly overtook.

Its Sunday sister, which sells 115,231, is in even more dire straits. The two papers lose several million pounds annually. Their influence in Westminster, Whitehall and other power centres is close to zero. Their future ownership, and even survival, is in doubt as the Irish telecoms billionaire Denis O'Brien increases his stake in Tony O'Reilly's parent company and presses for a rapid sale of the London titles.

Independent staff, I am told, are encouraged by Alton's appointment. It gives the paper, and O'Reilly's involvement in it, a sense of momentum. The arrival of a new editor suggests the owner is looking ahead to a new era. New printing presses are due in September. A former editor with Alton's record, reason the journalists, would not take on the job unless he had received strong assurances about the future.

I am also told that senior O'Reilly managers believe the Independent cannot trade for much longer on the kudos from its innovative "viewspaper" front pages, its powerful opposition to the Iraq invasion, and its pioneering switch to the compact format. It has to find fresh ways to make waves.

Yet Alton hardly seems likely to introduce radical change. He and Simon Kelner, the outgoing editor who becomes managing director and editor-in-chief, have long been close friends. They are both production men, brilliant at presentation and, particularly in Alton's case, sharp on detail. Both are sports nuts. Both prefer print to digital journalism. Both have a strong sense of mischief, probably the most important attribute for the editor of a small circulation paper that needs to get itself noticed. Both have political views that may be described as flexible or undogmatic, depending on how you look at it.

True, one committed his paper to supporting the Iraq invasion, the other to opposing it. But given different circumstances, it is easy to imagine either of them deciding on the opposite course. Many friendships were ruptured by Iraq. That between Alton and Kelner survived - another example of how similar they are. I suspect, in some respects, the Independent already carries Alton's stamp.

The paper's difficulty has always been that it lacks a coherent constituency. Though it's generally regarded as being on the left, this is not consistently reflected in its leaders and comment pages, where the diehard Conservatives Dominic Lawson and Bruce Anderson are among the strongest voices. It is not the paper of the public sector professions, as the Guardian is. But nor is it the paper of the old establishment, as the Times still is (just), or of the Tory heartlands, as the Telegraph is. Most newspapers have deep tribal loyalties; the Independent, as its name suggests, is non-tribal.

If anything, it is a paper for readers of refined sensibility, the sort who attend art-house cinemas, prefer Japanese cuisine, and abhor plastic bags. Its strengths are in green issues and arts news and features. It still declines to run tittle-tattle about the royal family. Many of its journalists think it should assert these upmarket credentials more strongly, eschewing features on, for example, Britain's worst-dressed men (recently borrowed from GQ) and the 10 best dining chairs. It should, they think, strive for the authority in serious general news that the Financial Times has achieved in business and financial news.

There is also a view, apparently shared by senior managers, that the paper which launched with James Fenton as its south-east Asia correspondent and Alexander Chancellor as its Washington correspondent should restore its reputation for carrying the best newspaper writing.

If O'Reilly, under challenge from O'Brien, is to convince shareholders that the Independent's losses are outweighed by its prestige value - owning a respectable newspaper is rather like having a clutch of peers on the board - he will not want the brand to be sullied by downmarket journalism. If anything, he may want to take it slightly upmarket. Alton is not the most obvious choice to do that. He transformed the Observer from an earnest, high-minded paper into one that embraced showbusiness, sex and crime. Some critics thought it moved too far towards a Daily Mail agenda.

In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies quotes a story of Alton, shortly after his appointment as Observer editor, meeting David Miliband, then running the prime minister's policy unit. Asked what changes he planned, Alton replied: "Bit more sex on the front page. More sport. That kind of thing." Davies concludes that Alton is not "a political animal".

That is to misunderstand the man, and to misinterpret his self-deprecating style. He is easily bored by party politics, as are many readers. But nobody who followed the Observer's campaign on civil liberties - led by Henry Porter's exhaustively researched comment page articles - should doubt his ability to engage with serious issues. Under his editorship, the Observer was not lacking in serious journalism. It just happened also to carry a large amount of less serious journalism, usually displayed more prominently. For example, Nick Cohen, recruited by Alton's predecessor Will Hutton, had his column moved to a left-hand page and his space cut in favour of the distinctly downmarket Jasper Gerard.

There is also the question of the Independent's politics. Some senior journalists fear that, under Alton, it will back David Cameron. Alton has indeed praised the Tory leader - describing him as "charming and nice, and tactically very skilful" - and once hinted, to considerable alarm in Farringdon Road, that the Observer might support him.

But the Independent has never advised its readers to vote for a particular party and is unlikely to depart from that custom.

Alton may give Cameron a fair wind, but I do not see that as a difficulty. He may also modify slightly what some see as the Independent's rather obsessive coverage of the consequences of the Iraq war. But there is no chance of the paper's broad stance being reversed.

Alton is no lefty, and thinks, in any case, that left and right are now meaningless terms. But the Independent's founders never intended it to be a left-wing paper. Their preference, in the late 80s, was for Thatcherism with a human face. They expected to gain most readers from the Telegraph and Times. As it turned out, they found leftwing journalists more willing to join their venture and acquired more readers from the Guardian than from other papers. The editorial line remained pro-market and generally pro-foreign intervention, but compassionate towards the poor (in a vague sort of way) and leftish on social issues such as race, crime and smacking. Its position, in many respects, anticipated Blairism. Alton, who in 2006 described hostility to Blair as "quite baffling", could claim to echo the founders' views more closely than Kelner has done.

Only a fool would write him off. He will be working in an unfamiliar environment with far more limited resources than he was used to at the Observer. He will inherit a paper that many in the industry think is doomed. One is bound to wonder - though he, in typically earthy language, describes it as "horseshit, utter bollocks" - if his move to the Independent is driven by a desire to get one back at his detractors in the Guardian Media Group. He is a proud man who, despite his amusing self-mockery, doesn't like it when others do the deprecating. But he is a strong leader, whose brilliance is acknowledged even by those who found him difficult to work with.

Alton has never been predictable - "mad" is the adjective often used - and, despite the similarities between the two, he will probably take more risks than Kelner, as a man of his age and track record can afford to. What Alton does at the Independent will be the most fascinating media story of the year.